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schemingreader (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} schemingreader) wrote,@ 2007-09-20 21:19:00 |
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Having a body, being a slasher
This isn't the post I wanted to write, but this is the one I did write. It's meta.
Having a body:
some musings about weight loss, sex, gender, fan fiction, and some other stuff.
some weighty thoughts
I grew up with a habitual weight loss dieter. My mom weighed herself every day, and as far as I know, she still does. Through my fabulous feminist enlightenment, I learned that my mother's emphasis on weight and appearance was diverting her from concentrating on other things, perhaps from happiness and fulfillment. Well, no one should worry that my mother doesn't have enough attention to think about more than one thing at a time, but it is true that she's never been a very happy person, and her negative feelings about her body are one of the most important reasons for that. The closest my mom has been to happy were the several times when she had lost a lot of weight, but even then she always seems anxious. Pursuing a goal of physical beauty has made her miserable. She is unable to accept a compliment on her appearance without saying either, "Yes, but I need to lose X amount of weight to look really good" or "Yes, I know I look good in this because I lost X amount of weight..." and then of course she has to go on and tell you all about how.
Aside from being unhappy about her own body, my mom is also unhappy about my body. She has worried about my weight since I was a (normal weight) five year old. I recall being in kindergarten when she stood me up in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom, and, screaming in terrifying rage, told me about how fat I was becoming. She pinched my (not especially fat) thighs and told me that I had to eat less.
I have some good reasons not to like weight loss dieting.
And now for something completely different: weight loss diets are often the only excuse that many women have to pay attention to their own needs, their own tastes, and their own bodies. To decide to lose weight by dieting is to decide to eat better, more expensive, and I think tastier food. Women on many weight loss diets wind up cooking more from scratch, and they sometimes cook separate meals just for themselves. They can't be the garbage disposal for other people's meals anymore. I think this realization may have completely blown my mind.
This morning I made myself a salad and put water chestnuts on it. I wouldn't have even thought of doing that if I hadn't read a book on vegan weight loss in a paroxysm of thinking I needed to lose weight. I love water chestnuts and I'm the only one in my family who does, so until they became diet food, I didn't buy them. If it weren't for dieting, I wouldn't get to have food I like. I think that's a weird thing.
The flipside of the sexist insistence what women are our bodies and only our bodies, and that as such, we should look a certain, narrowly circumscribed way, is an implicit permission to pay attention to our bodies: their health, their pleasure, their physicality.
Pretending not to have a body
For many of us, pretending that we are only minds has given us the opportunity to explore the intelligence that centuries of sexist ideology has denied we possess. It is this aspect of our humanness--our ability to think--that is ever in doubt. Today is unfashionable to say that all women are stupid, exactly. Instead our intelligence is denigrated by attempt to establish mental differences between the sexes. Many of the women in my life, and on my friends list here, decided to be minds, not bodies, and the trade-off is not always to our advantage. We have not entirely evaded the mandate for beauty, thinness and grooming--we still get shit for dumping femininity, weird guilt for not having everything organized and together. At the same time, we lose out because we have to chose not to be our bodies to a greater or lesser extent.
Kind of hard to have a brilliant sex life is you aren't actually in your body.
At least two people on my flist have said, in the last week or so, that they are not pretty. I am wondering about this. I am boggled by this. I am identifying with this. What is this "pretty"? What does it mean to be beautiful, when what is beautiful is so very narrowly defined? The feminine ideal is like, I don't know, a thoroughbred dog show.
There's some moment for a lot of us where we confront our bodies in all their power. Maybe it's dancing. Maybe it's sex, or having a baby. Maybe it's nursing. Maybe it's riding your bike, or weeding your garden. Something you put your hand to required you to have a whole body that could do something amazing, and you did it. Or perhaps it was physical pain that forced you to confront your body's abilities and disabilities. (Sorry that there are so many on my flist for whom this is true. Nothing like illness and disability to make you want to be only mind again.)
Or maybe this hasn't happened to you, yet. I think there is a spectrum of experience when people say "mind/body duality? I pick mind!"
Slash: another solution to the mind/body problem, but not the most elegant either
In the meantime, you and I and all of our pals have been writing and reading vast oceans of erotica. What have you learned about yourself from doing this? Maybe, if you like slash, that you really love to experience erotic feeling through someone else's body, at a remove from yourself. (There are some women reading slash who can't bear to read het fan fiction, because they just find the obsessive description of women's bodies that's a part of erotic writing, a total squick.)
Is this the best solution to the mind/body problem? We do engage in a lot of discussion of what we like. Though it's not always what we like, with our bodies, it's what we like with our minds, as every bit of the experience of erotica happens in the mind. In times of no sex, the brain can get us through the drought with its mighty powers. Thanks, brain!
Is sex by brain alone a step toward, or away from, integrating body and mind? I probably shouldn't care. It creates a delightful, innocent promiscuity. I think I like that part. What do you think?
I want there to be a path back to the mind and body hanging out together. I don't want to have to choose to lose my mind to be able to find my body. I don't want to descend into that terrible hatred of my whole self to come out the other side unified and whole. The unfortunate truth is that I find it hard to believe in seeking suffering.
I end here because I just don't have a compelling exhortation. Okay, maybe it's to say that you should love yourself as much as your friends love you, and in the same way of loving the whole thing, even the less lovable bits.
This isn't the post I wanted to write, but this is the one I did write. It's meta.
some musings about weight loss, sex, gender, fan fiction, and some other stuff.
some weighty thoughts
I grew up with a habitual weight loss dieter. My mom weighed herself every day, and as far as I know, she still does. Through my fabulous feminist enlightenment, I learned that my mother's emphasis on weight and appearance was diverting her from concentrating on other things, perhaps from happiness and fulfillment. Well, no one should worry that my mother doesn't have enough attention to think about more than one thing at a time, but it is true that she's never been a very happy person, and her negative feelings about her body are one of the most important reasons for that. The closest my mom has been to happy were the several times when she had lost a lot of weight, but even then she always seems anxious. Pursuing a goal of physical beauty has made her miserable. She is unable to accept a compliment on her appearance without saying either, "Yes, but I need to lose X amount of weight to look really good" or "Yes, I know I look good in this because I lost X amount of weight..." and then of course she has to go on and tell you all about how.
Aside from being unhappy about her own body, my mom is also unhappy about my body. She has worried about my weight since I was a (normal weight) five year old. I recall being in kindergarten when she stood me up in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom, and, screaming in terrifying rage, told me about how fat I was becoming. She pinched my (not especially fat) thighs and told me that I had to eat less.
I have some good reasons not to like weight loss dieting.
And now for something completely different: weight loss diets are often the only excuse that many women have to pay attention to their own needs, their own tastes, and their own bodies. To decide to lose weight by dieting is to decide to eat better, more expensive, and I think tastier food. Women on many weight loss diets wind up cooking more from scratch, and they sometimes cook separate meals just for themselves. They can't be the garbage disposal for other people's meals anymore. I think this realization may have completely blown my mind.
This morning I made myself a salad and put water chestnuts on it. I wouldn't have even thought of doing that if I hadn't read a book on vegan weight loss in a paroxysm of thinking I needed to lose weight. I love water chestnuts and I'm the only one in my family who does, so until they became diet food, I didn't buy them. If it weren't for dieting, I wouldn't get to have food I like. I think that's a weird thing.
The flipside of the sexist insistence what women are our bodies and only our bodies, and that as such, we should look a certain, narrowly circumscribed way, is an implicit permission to pay attention to our bodies: their health, their pleasure, their physicality.
Pretending not to have a body
For many of us, pretending that we are only minds has given us the opportunity to explore the intelligence that centuries of sexist ideology has denied we possess. It is this aspect of our humanness--our ability to think--that is ever in doubt. Today is unfashionable to say that all women are stupid, exactly. Instead our intelligence is denigrated by attempt to establish mental differences between the sexes. Many of the women in my life, and on my friends list here, decided to be minds, not bodies, and the trade-off is not always to our advantage. We have not entirely evaded the mandate for beauty, thinness and grooming--we still get shit for dumping femininity, weird guilt for not having everything organized and together. At the same time, we lose out because we have to chose not to be our bodies to a greater or lesser extent.
Kind of hard to have a brilliant sex life is you aren't actually in your body.
At least two people on my flist have said, in the last week or so, that they are not pretty. I am wondering about this. I am boggled by this. I am identifying with this. What is this "pretty"? What does it mean to be beautiful, when what is beautiful is so very narrowly defined? The feminine ideal is like, I don't know, a thoroughbred dog show.
There's some moment for a lot of us where we confront our bodies in all their power. Maybe it's dancing. Maybe it's sex, or having a baby. Maybe it's nursing. Maybe it's riding your bike, or weeding your garden. Something you put your hand to required you to have a whole body that could do something amazing, and you did it. Or perhaps it was physical pain that forced you to confront your body's abilities and disabilities. (Sorry that there are so many on my flist for whom this is true. Nothing like illness and disability to make you want to be only mind again.)
Or maybe this hasn't happened to you, yet. I think there is a spectrum of experience when people say "mind/body duality? I pick mind!"
Slash: another solution to the mind/body problem, but not the most elegant either
In the meantime, you and I and all of our pals have been writing and reading vast oceans of erotica. What have you learned about yourself from doing this? Maybe, if you like slash, that you really love to experience erotic feeling through someone else's body, at a remove from yourself. (There are some women reading slash who can't bear to read het fan fiction, because they just find the obsessive description of women's bodies that's a part of erotic writing, a total squick.)
Is this the best solution to the mind/body problem? We do engage in a lot of discussion of what we like. Though it's not always what we like, with our bodies, it's what we like with our minds, as every bit of the experience of erotica happens in the mind. In times of no sex, the brain can get us through the drought with its mighty powers. Thanks, brain!
Is sex by brain alone a step toward, or away from, integrating body and mind? I probably shouldn't care. It creates a delightful, innocent promiscuity. I think I like that part. What do you think?
I want there to be a path back to the mind and body hanging out together. I don't want to have to choose to lose my mind to be able to find my body. I don't want to descend into that terrible hatred of my whole self to come out the other side unified and whole. The unfortunate truth is that I find it hard to believe in seeking suffering.
I end here because I just don't have a compelling exhortation. Okay, maybe it's to say that you should love yourself as much as your friends love you, and in the same way of loving the whole thing, even the less lovable bits.
